OK, so last night my daughter was struggling to upload her common app essay. It is 624 words–under the 650 maximum. But the common app was giving her some kind of message that indicated it couldn’t take that many words. She tried to get some help, but could not! Is there anyway to contact someone for technical support?
Support is here:
https://appsupport.commonapp.org/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=33013&_referrer=http://www.commonapp.org/contact-us
It’s been a few years since my last child applied, so I may be wrong on this. But if I recall correctly, the Common App counts words differently than the Word program does. Some programs count the actually separate clusters of letters as words, while others count the total number of characters and divide by 5 to get an average number of words. Try taking out a few sentences from the essay and see if it fits then. If it does, then that’s what’s going on.
My D applied a few years back when the CA went completely online and had a number of glitches. She was able to successfully complete her applications on time by using all the available internet browsers. If she had issues with I.E., she would use Google Chrome, or Firefox, or Safari. You also have Edge today. It is a pain to try the same thing on 4 different browsers, but it worked for her.
Good luck.
^^^^This. That is what I was going to suggest. Try using different browsers. We had issues when trying to upload a picture for the ACT a couple of years ago. Would not work with chrome or firefox but good old internet explorer worked like a charm.
Last year my d found that after she uploaded the essay, for some reason a lot of the puncutation was totally messed up. Unfortunately she only discovered this after submitting her second app, so she had to contact the first college and submit the correct version of the essay. Check the uploaded version carefully.
D had nightmares with the common app when she applied to colleges in 2014. She had trouble uploading, couldn’t “preview” the app, and also had issues with punctuation. One of her applications, especially, was a mess. Like others mentioned, she ended up trying different browsers. Firefox seemed to work best. You might also try using a different computer.